Today is the centennial of the composer John Cage, who's probably most widely known for "4'33," which instructs the musician to play nothing at all for four minutes and 33 seconds. LA Times music critic Mark Swed has written a great piece about Cage ("No one in the last century did more to change the way much of the world now thinks about, makes and consumes art."), detailing his early life in Los Angeles, which is often overlooked: "the voluminous Cage literature has underestimated or glossed over the degree to which his revolutionary ideas had their origins in the singular and sometimes outlandish L.A. cultural stew of the '20s and '30s -- a liberating, vibrantly open society where highbrow émigré artists mixed with mystics and movie stars, where artistic and sexual experimentation were not necessarily separate activities." Cage was born Westlake; lived in Glassell Park, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood (in the Schindler House); and studied at Pomona, UCLA, and USC. He was friends with the gay activist and Mattachine Society cofounder Harry Hay, studied with Arnold Schoenberg, and had a long affair with Rudolph Schindler's wife Pauline. Cage moved to New York in the 1940s and spent the rest of his life there, but he was still a pretty badass Angeleno. Here's your tour of John Cage's Los Angeles (do read Swed's story for much more).